1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to Internet searches and more specifically to geographical information based search restrictions.
2. Related Art
Searching for information on the Internet is a very common activity that requires the use of a browser capable of retrieving information from a website. Typically, a search website is accessed and search terms are provided by typing in some free form text. A search engine receives the search terms and retrieves search results.
During conventional search operations that are performed using current search engines, geographical information is not used as part of the search. Therefore, search results are returned that may provide information on products or services available half way around the world and that information is often not very useful to a user. Conventional search engines are not based on the concept of prioritizing or limiting search results based on the “distance from a user.” Often, people that desiring to locate a store or a service on the Internet may want to find one that is geographically close to where they live or where they are currently searching from. People use maps to find locations and roads to travel. However, during online searches, they are likely to retrieve information devoid of any sense of “proximity” to a user.
When searching based on the world map, contextually irrelevant search results are often displayed. Search engines based on the world map directly show the search results on the map. When a search is done based on a search string, a huge list of search results will be generated and displayed on the client device's screen and possibly marked on the world map. Oftentimes, the map window of the search engine will get cluttered with markers corresponding to search items, mostly less relevant to the current search context.
Current search engines generate a huge amount of redundant traffic during the search operation. Most of the search results that are communicated to a client device are irrelevant and redundant. They appear in the search list just because the search string appears in or correlates to those WebPages. In several contexts, the user is interested in doing the search based on the search string correlating with a title of a webpage, and not on the basis of search string appearing inside the web page content. In that situation if the search engine outputs all the WebPages containing the search string, then most of the search results will be unusable or irrelevant to the user. The required or the most relevant WebPages may appear deep inside the search result list and the user may fail to identify and open this relevant content for his or her use.
In the few map based search engines that are currently available, there is no means to control the items that show up in a search list in terms of the proximity to the user's current location. There are no means to facilitate control on the arbitrary size of the search geographic region, by which a user can systematically partition a large search area on the map to smaller areas, and do the search operations more systematically and locally on the world map. In the current search engines the search region is selectable only to certain extent for e.g. a predefined area or a location such a city, a state, or a country. Often search results comprise of service providers or stores that do not really exist in the region where they are purported to conduct business. Often, when searching for stores in a city, business and web pages show up during a search that are thousands of miles away from the city of interest.
Many online maps provide zooming functionality. User's areas of interest may be zoomed in or out to a certain extent and the details of various locations (for example a restaurant) can be selected and visualized. If the area or the location that is focused on is too large and/or if the user is not aware of the topography of the area, it will be very difficult or confusing to the user when zooming in and out on a particular street and picking the business firm's premise/location that the user is looking for. In other words, it becomes difficult for the user to pick an exact and small location from a predefined large area or location in the map. In this process, the location a user is searching for cannot be resolved properly to select the required optimal search results, and this issue is enhanced when there is a lot of clutter within a small search region of the world map.
In a search operation using current search engines, the user has no control, or at best a limited control, over the search result output for a given search string. The search results presented to the user is in the order of the relevance of the webpage to a user entered search string or on the basis of the popularity of the website, and not on geographic proximity or information. This criterion built into the current search engines are not always the best ones. For example if a user is looking for a restaurant in a nearby place, the search results should be provided in a distance wise order of the physical address of the restaurant from the current location of the user. Often the restaurants located are not related to the user's location, or are located elsewhere but still show up in the search results.
Also, there is a large number of Internet squatters and scammer who try to push their business illegally on the Internet. Their web links gets crawled like any other legal and authentic websites and listed during the search, making the user get confused or misled in picking a right search item from the search result list. Current search engine have no effective algorithms or techniques built-in that can either warn or block/step sites that are related to the Internet squatters and scammers. Due to the lack of this function, the Internet has become a haven for both the legal and illegal businesses. In the process, legal and authentic organizations and businesses are loosing legitimate business to scam artists. Thus, the current search engines are failing in testing and blocking unauthorized or illegal businesses and there are no tests for the authenticity of a website on the Internet when conducting searches. Thus current search engines have no way to identify Internet squatters and scammers among legitimate business on the Internet.
The current web-based search engines do not have any built-in techniques that can determine the current GPS (Global Positioning System) location of the user and mark it on the world map, or use it for searches that are performed by the user. In that case, the user often has no indication or ability to pinpoint searches on his current location in an unknown remote city. Therefore it is hard to find, for example a close coffee shop, even though the user is able to find some random coffee shops that show up on his laptop during a search. This is due to a lack of an ability to incorporate GPS coordinates (longitude and latitude in angle) in searches, which is a serious drawback for user requiring geographic-based search results.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with the present invention.